The Supreme Court rules that states may not discriminate against religious schools in granting vouchers.
A bipartisan group of senators come up with a gun control plan.
And the Biden administration keeps whistling past the economic graveyard.
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We are all still awaiting the Supreme Court's final ruling on overruling Roe v. Wade, but there was another really important decision that came down from the Supreme Court yesterday.
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Well, we are all still awaiting the Supreme Court's final ruling on overruling Roe versus Wade.
But there was another really important decision that came down from the Supreme Court yesterday.
The case was called Carson v. Makin, and it was decided 6 to 3 with Justice Roberts, Chief Justice Roberts writing the opinion.
He was joined by Thomas Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.
Of course, the liberals on the court, that would be Justice Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion.
And then Sotomayor filed a separate dissenting opinion, which was even more extreme because she is the most extreme justice on the court by a long shot.
Basically, what happened in this case, according to the Supreme Court, is that Maine had enacted a program of tuition assistance for parents who live in school districts that don't operate a secondary school Under that program, parents designate the secondary school they want their child to attend, either public or private, and then the school district transmits payments to that school to help defray the cost of tuition.
Most private schools are eligible to receive the payments so long as they are quote-unquote non-sectarian.
So then a bunch of religious schools sued and they said this violates the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
The idea being this is discrimination against religion.
And if you say that the only schools that are allowed to receive funding are non-religious schools, then you are effectively violating freedom of religion by discriminating against schools that are religious.
This is a major issue because right now, across the country, we have seen voucher programs arise.
In my home state of Florida, there are effectively voucher programs for a huge variety of students.
And the question is whether a state is allowed to deny those vouchers to religious schools.
Now, on the face of it, the answer would be obviously not.
It's very silly to say that you should be allowed to use your voucher for some sort of secular school.
The idea being that secular school is sort of the default, but not for a religious school of your choosing.
Again, this is not the government directly funding religious schools.
This is the government funding you and you deciding whether to put that money into a religious school.
By the way, there'd be nothing wrong with the government directly funding religious schools so long as they're also funding not religious schools.
If they're funding Jewish schools and Catholic schools, that is obviously not religious discrimination.
But what we will see is that the left believes, and this is really, I think, the takeaway from this case.
If the left had its way, all religion would be private and all secularism would be public.
All that the right wants, and this is pretty clear here, is that religion and non-religion should be on equal footing when it comes to public funding, at least for private institutions.
Nobody is saying they're going to teach Bible class in a public school.
But we have now reached the point in American politics where it is considered absolutely de rigueur to fly a gay pride flag in a public school.
But if you put up a display of the Ten Commandments, then this is a violation of church and state.
Again, that phrase, the church and state boundary, that never appears in the Constitution of the United States.
That's not what the Free Exercise and the Establishment Clause of the Constitution of the United States actually mean.
The United States Constitution, when it says that the Congress shall not abridge free exercise of religion and shall establish no religion, The court has tended to read those as two separate clauses.
They're not two separate clauses.
They're meant to be read together.
The basic idea there is that you're not allowed to abridge the free exercise of somebody's religion by establishing a religion.
It is not that you establish a religion by backing religion in any way.
That was never the suggestion of the Founding Fathers.
And that would have been out of step with 175 years of practice in the United States, basically up until the court rulings of the 1960s.
So Justice Roberts in this case, he says the Maine's constitution provides that the state's legislature shall require the several towns to make suitable provision at their own expense for the support and maintenance of public schools.
In accordance with that command, the legislature has required that every school-aged child in Maine shall be provided an opportunity to receive the benefits of a free public education and that the required schools be operated by the legislative and governing bodies of local school administrative units.
But Maine is also the most rural state in the Union, though a lot of people live in the middle of nowhere.
For many school districts, the realities of remote geography and low population density make those commands difficult to heed.
Indeed, of Maine's 260 school administrative units, fewer than half operate a public secondary school of their own, meaning a high school.
Maine has sought to deal with this problem in part by creating a program of tuition assistance for families that reside in these local areas, so they don't Want to spend the money to set up a public school in a town with five kids.
So instead what they've said is, we're going to give you a voucher, you use that voucher however you want.
Under that program, if an SAU neither operates its own public secondary school nor contracts with a particular public or private school for the education of its school-aged children, the SAU must pay the tuition at the public school or the approved private school of the parent's choice at which the student is accepted.
Parents who want to take advantage of this benefit first select the school they wish their child to attend.
If they select a private school that has been approved by the Maine Department of Education, then the parent's SAU pays the tuition at the chosen school up to a specified maximum rate.
So if you want to receive these payments, you have to be approved under certain requirements under Maine compulsory education law.
So you have to be accredited by a New England association of schools and colleges or approved for attendance purposes by the department.
The school must meet specific curricular requirements like using English as the language of instruction and offering a course in Maine's history and maintaining a student teacher ratio of not more than 30 to one.
And the program imposes no geographic limitation.
Parents may direct tuition payments to schools inside or outside the state, or even in foreign countries.
In schools that qualify for the program because they are accredited, teachers don't need to be certified by the state.
Maine's curricular requirements do not apply.
Single-sex schools are acceptable.
Prior to 1981, parents could direct the tuition assistance payments to religious schools.
In the 1979-80 school year, according to Chief Justice Roberts, over 200 Maine students opted to attend such schools through the tuition assistance program.
In 1981, Maine imposed a new requirement that any school receiving tuition assistance payments must be, quote, a non-sectarian school in accordance with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
That provision was enacted in response to an opinion by the Maine Attorney General taking the position that if you publicly fund a private religious school, this violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
We subsequently held that a benefit program under which private citizens direct government aid to religious schools wholly as a result of their genuine and independent private choice.
That's not Establishment.
That was a case called Zelman v. Simmons-Harris in 2002.
The main legislature considered a proposed bill to repeal the non-sectarian requirement, but then rejected it.
And now the court holds that they had to reject it because the simple fact is that the free exercise clause requires non-discrimination between religion and a religion.
Which makes perfect sense, right?
This makes perfect sense.
According to the court, the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment protects against indirect coercion or penalties on the free exercise of religion, not just outright prohibitions.
In particular, we have repeatedly held that a state violates the Free Exercise Clause when it excludes religious observers from otherwise available public benefits.
The state may not withhold unemployment benefits, for instance, on the ground that an individual lost his job for refusing to abandon the dictates of his faith.
We've recently applied these principles in the context of two state efforts to withhold otherwise available public benefits from religious organizations.
In a 2017 case, Wright's Chief Justice Roberts reconsidered a Missouri program that offered grants to qualifying nonprofit organizations that installed cushioning playground surfaces made from recycled rubber tires.
The Missouri Department of Natural Resources maintained an express policy of denying such grants to any applicant owned or controlled by a church, sect, or other religious entity.
The Trinity Lutheran Church Child Learning Center applied for a grant to resurface its gravel playground.
The department denied on the grounds that the center was operated by the church.
And they said, no, no, no, this is discrimination on the basis of religion.
And then they came to a similar conclusion in another case called Espinoza, a couple of years ago, in which they said that a Montana program that provided tax credits to donors who sponsored scholarships for private school tuition Also had to include religious schools.
So now they're just saying that if you have a voucher program and it is broadly applicable, you cannot exclude religious schools because that would violate the free exercise clause.
Now, this makes perfect sense.
And as I'll talk about in just a second, this actually has some ramifications for the future of, I think, broader religious cases, religious freedom cases in the country.
The left, however, thinks that states should be able to discriminate actively against religion.
And really, they believe that the state should actively discriminate against religion.
So Justice Breyer and Kagan and Sotomayor, they actually put forward a dissent in which they say that a state is allowed to further anti-establishment interests by withholding aid from religious institutions without violating the Constitution's protections for the free exercise of religion.
So, meaning that it is not a violation of the Free Exercise Clause and it also is avoiding the Establishment Clause.
Now, Justice Sotomayor, that sort of middle road here from Breyer and Kagan and Sotomayor sort of joins.
Right at the very end of Breyer's dissent, he sort of explains.
He says, main wish is to provide children within the state with a secular public education.
This wish embodies in significant part the constitutional need to avoid spending public money to support what is essentially the teaching and practice of religion.
That need is reinforced by the fact that we are today a nation of more than 330 million people who ascribe to over 100 different religions.
In that context, state neutrality with respect to religion is particularly important.
So, according to the left, neutrality with respect to religion means no religion.
No publicly sponsored religion, even if it's not direct subsidy.
Even if it's you picking where to put the money.
Because what they wish, this is what the left wishes, is for secularism to be the public way of the republic, and religion is to be utterly private.
And if you wish to send your kid to a religious school, you have to pay twice.
You have to pay for a public school for someone else's kid, and then you also have to pay for a religious school for your own kid.
Which seems to violate basic notions of fairness when it comes to the Free Exercise Clause and when it comes to, again, basic justice.
I'm paying for many, many kids who are not my own in the United States, right?
I'm paying for a lot of kids to go to crappy public schools, and then I'm also paying for my kids not to go to public school because I wish them to learn a value system that I actually care about.
And somebody yesterday was joking, well, what are you going to do now?
If you're saying that, according to the Supreme Court, you have to subsidize religion, what are you going to?
If a parent wants to send their kid to the Church of Satan school around the corner, well, what are you going to do?
Subsidize it?
And the answer is, first of all, that's called the local public school in many areas of the country.
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Yeah, but Justice Sotomayor makes it perfectly clear what the left believes about religion.
And this is, I think, the real conflict in the country over religious freedom.
Justice Sotomayor says this court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the framers sought to build. This court should not have started down this path five years ago. Before Trinity Lutheran, it was well established that both the United States and state constitutions embody distinct views on the subject of religion in favor of free exercise but opposed to establishment that find no counterpart with respect to other constitutional rights.
Because of this tension, the court recognized room for play in the joints between the religion clauses with some state actions permitted by the establishment clause, but not required by the free exercise clause.
Moreover, the court for many decades understood the establishment clause to prohibit government from funding religious exercise.
Over time, the court eroded these principles in certain respects.
Trinity Lutheran veered sharply from certain understandings.
After assuming away an establishment clause violation, the court revolutionized free exercise doctrine by equating a state's decision not to fund a religious organization with a presumptively unconstitutional discrimination on the basis of religious status.
Well, I mean, yes.
If I decide that I'm going to subsidize everybody except for the black people in my neighborhood, That seems to be the same thing as me discriminating against the black people in my neighborhood, would it not be?
I'm confused as to why me giving benefits to every school except for these religious schools is not active discrimination against those schools.
So Justice Sotomayor, she says, the consequences of the court's rapid transformation of the religion clauses must not be understated.
From a doctrinal perspective, the court's failure to apply the play in the joints principle here.
By the way, I have to say it is hysterical that we have a court that cites two things like the play in the joints principle.
We're in the concept... The play in the joints principle?
That's just an excuse to do whatever you want.
If I say, listen, if I say to my kids, I have a set of rules at home.
The rules are that you have to clear your plate at the end of the meal.
And also then you have to go brush your teeth.
But I also have a play in the joints principle, which means I can do whatever the hell I want.
And I now invoke this play in the joints principle to also say that you have to do the dishes.
Like, the play in the joints principle.
There's no such...
The play in the joint principle is a contradiction in terms.
A principle is a thing that is unchanging and eternal.
Play in the joint is specifically ad hoc.
But, says Justice Sotomayor, the court's increasingly expansive view of the free exercise clause risks swallowing the space between the religion clauses that once permitted religious exercise to exist without sponsorship and also without interference.
The court's decision is especially perverse because the benefit at issue is the public educations which all of Maine's children are entitled under the state constitution.
Right, but what she neglects to point out is that parents are the ones who get to make the call.
What she really wants is the state of Maine to prevent parents from sending their kids to religious school by only subsidizing these parents to send their kids to non-sectarian schools.
That's really what she wants.
She says, in 2017, I feared the court was leading us to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment.
Well, I mean, separation of church and state is not even in the Constitution.
It's a letter of Thomas Jefferson.
Today, the court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation.
No, it just says, the court is just saying that you can't discriminate actively against religion.
Now, the reason that this makes a rather large difference is because we are about to see a spate of cases that come up with regard to quote-unquote non-sectarian interests running directly up against religious exercise.
This is likely to happen because Neil Gorsuch and the Supreme Court have decided, for example, that the Civil Rights Act of 1965 magically now covers Transgender men or transgender women, for example.
A Title IX, which was designed to protect biological women from the predations of biological men and to protect biological women from discrimination by biological men.
Now it covers men who think they are women or women who think they are men.
This runs directly in the face of a wide variety of religious practice in the United States.
The simple fact is that, for example, men and women are treated differently in Christianity.
Men and women are treated differently in Judaism.
Men and women are treated differently in Islam.
In every major religion in the United States, men and women are treated differently because the historic reality of the ages is that men and women are different.
And this means they have different social roles.
It doesn't mean that women can't do incredibly important things.
More important things than men, in many cases.
But the differences in religious roles between men and women are pretty baked in.
Beyond that, you have the issue of Obergefell.
And I've been suggesting, literally since Obergefell was brought down by the Supreme Court in 2013, in fact, before it, I said that if the state started subsidizing same-sex marriage, there would come a point where leftist states started cracking down on churches and saying that any institution that does not reflect our social policy with respect to same-sex marriage, if they don't believe that Justice Kennedy was magically the Pope and got to decide for everyone what morality was, That states would start discriminating against religious institutions.
And so it seems the Supreme Court is now moving in the direction of what we call the Utah Rule.
The Utah Rule exists, obviously, in the state of Utah.
And basically, it has a very expansive, quote-unquote, non-discrimination law.
It prevents discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and all the rest.
But it has religious exemptions.
It has a broad religious carve-out.
It seems like this court is trying to signal that it is going to provide for broad religious carve-outs from secular non-discrimination law.
Now the problem with that, of course, is that the rubber meets the road in what does religious practice look like?
Because the reality is that religious people...
Don't just practice their religion in religious institutions.
Now what the left would like to do is pretend that religious institutions don't even exist.
We've now seen a case in New York, for example, where Yeshiva University, the largest Orthodox Jewish institution in the United States at a higher education level, has now been mandated by the New York City Health Department, among other things.
The New York City commissioners have decided, and a court has now held with them, that Yeshiva University has to subsidize gay pride groups at a modern Orthodox Jewish university By the way, Orthodox Judaism does not approve of homosexual activity.
So now they have to subsidize and provide space for gay pride groups at an Orthodox school because they say, well, this isn't really a Jewish institution.
It's a secular institution that does Jewish things.
So that is going to become a major.
I would assume that that is going to be struck down by the Supreme Court.
In that case, we'll end up in the Supreme Court.
But what happens to all of the religious people in daily life who say, for example, that they do not wish to participate in a gay wedding?
We've seen that the court has sort of elided this in the Masterpiece Cake Shop case, where the court decided that we were going to say that a person doesn't have to use their artistic endeavors.
They can't be violated on First Amendment grounds.
You don't have to use your artistic skill to do something.
What if I'm not doing something artistic?
What if I'm a plumber and I just don't feel like doing the plumbing at a gay bar?
Because I object to gay bars in general.
Is that a violation of the First Amendment on religion grounds?
Is that a violation of the First Amendment on free speech grounds?
What exactly is the violation?
Or what if I just own a private corporation?
And my private corporation does not wish to subsidize healthcare for same-sex partners, for example, because I don't believe that gay marriage is a moral thing.
Presumably the court now forces me, the religious person, to run my business in a way that runs directly counter to my morality.
This is the big problem with when you have forcible secularism as the state of play.
There will be a conflict, and we'll have to see how broadly the Supreme Court is willing to carve religious exemptions to these so-called non-discrimination laws, which actively discriminate against people with religious viewpoints.
But this case is definitely a step in the right direction.
Naturally, you have legal experts like Jeffrey Toobin, who, when he's not masturbating on camera in front of his Zoom colleagues, is still the legal analyst at CNN.
He is saying that this Supreme Court decision violates the Establishment Clause.
Listening to Jeffrey Toobin disclaim on legal matters, let's just say it seems a little bit self-serving.
Here we go.
Under the Free Exercise Clause, we have parochial schools in this country, and parents can educate their children under any sort of religion they like.
However, there is also the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which said the Congress cannot establish a religion.
And historically, the Court has said If there is government money going to religious institutions, including schools, that is a violation of the Establishment Clause.
Okay, that is not, okay, him saying that this is a violation of the Establishment Clause if you choose to send your kids to a religious school with the voucher that has been provided to you is, of course, silly.
But this, it does demonstrate, once again, that the real battle over religion in the United States is whether it will be forcibly disestablished by the government, which is the perspective of the left.
You can't pray on a field, right?
This is going to be a case that also the Supreme Court is deciding this term, is if you are allowed after a football game to kneel in prayer The left would like to say no, or whether we are going to allow religious people to actually be religious.
And this conflict has been a long time coming because the left has been pushing for forcible secularization of American society across every major institution in the society.
So it's good to see the Supreme Court fight back against that yesterday.
Chief Justice Roberts, rarely in a controversial case, actually making the right decision.
The left has basically been saying for a very, very long time that you can be religious, you know, not in public.
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Okay, meanwhile, the Senate Republicans, many of them seem to be eager for some reason to hand Joe Biden some sort of legislative victory.
So Joe Biden is in serious trouble.
His approval rating is in the 30s.
He's just doing a terrible job.
Well, last night, a bunch of Republican senators and some Democratic senators, they got together for a bipartisan gun control bill.
They're trying to ram this thing through before anybody actually reads it.
It's had an 80 page bill and it is very legalistic, right?
It refers to a lot of other bills.
So some bills are sort of self-encapsulated.
This one is not.
It changes old law.
It kind of goes in and changes these.
So in order to understand this provision, you have to read the old law and all the rest of it.
This is the complaint of both Senators Marco Rubio and Mike Lee.
We've said, hold up, you don't get to throw an 80 page bill at us and then ask us to vote on it five minutes later.
We at least get to read the thing.
Joe Biden has been pushing for something on gun control just so he can tell his constituents he did something on gun control.
Here was Joe Biden reading his script yesterday.
Have you received my briefing on the guns legislation that senators say that they've gotten to a legislative text point?
Very brief briefing before I walked in the room to make sure I say, let them announce it and then I'll speak to it.
I'll announce it and I'll speak to you.
Well, they're now providing a service to that addled old fellow.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Senate began debate Tuesday on bipartisan legislation intended to curb gun violence in what would represent the first major federal change to gun laws in decades.
Now, the reality is that the changes that are being proposed are not particularly major.
They are not good.
You know, the additional funding of red flag laws without any sort of specificity as to how those red flag laws are to be applied.
That is not a great idea.
The bill is apparently pretty vague and it's unclear exactly how the black letter law will then be interpreted by states, how grants will be given and all the rest.
But it seems like this was just a do something moment.
And this is what happens when you make policy on the back of emergency.
Whenever there is something horrible that happens in this act as a spur toward legislation, legislation usually is crap.
That tends to be the pattern in American life.
The Patriot Act was wildly overbroad, and it was wildly overbroad because it was a reaction to 9-11.
Whenever there is some sort of major national catastrophe, and then legislators jump into the fray to solve the problem, very often they do more harm than good.
The proposed legislation released earlier on Tuesday evening is the result of weeks of negotiations that started, of course, after the mass shootings at a supermarket, largely black, in Buffalo, New York, and at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
According to the Wall Street Journal, 10 Republicans signed on to the bill's framework released earlier this month.
Senate leaders from both parties have endorsed it, raising the likelihood of passage in the 50-50 chamber.
Now, I think that the logic here Senator Mitch McConnell is take the gun control issue off the table for 2022.
The idea is if we pass something, then we will be able to say when Joe Biden says, they wouldn't do anything.
And they'll be able to say, well, actually, we signed on to a bipartisan piece of legislation with you on gun control.
So what you're whining about?
Are you trying to castigate us as extreme?
Well, we work with you on this small piece of gun control legislation.
I understand the logic of it.
This is why McConnell is backing the bill.
On the other hand, there's the argument to be made that handing Joe Biden any sort of legislative victory is a mistake.
Because just from a political point of view, we'll get to the details of the bill in a second, from a political point of view, saying to Joe Biden, you can't get anything done.
You have no ability to govern because you keep proposing things that people don't like.
That is the other point of view here.
And taking the wind out of the sails of your base, many of whom are very exercised by the possibility of passage of these sorts of broad federal That is a bad idea as well.
And that is a bad idea as well.
The bill would set up a $750 million funds, help states put in place and enforce extreme protection orders known as red flag laws that allow firearms to be removed if a person is deemed dangerous to themselves or others.
And again, I've said before, and in principle, the idea of a red flag log, if you're talking about somebody who's exhibiting truly mentally dangerous behavior, like really dangerous, like going online and threatening people, or somebody who's murdering small animals.
Because you've seen people on the left who have routinely said things like, if you disagree with me, I'm just gonna try to take your guns away.
And that, I think, rightly scares the living hell out of people.
Because one of the problems with an extreme protection order is that it is enforced without actually the ability to rebut right away.
The police come and they take your guns before you actually have a chance to go in front of a judge and explain why the guns should not be taken.
If passed, the bill would also close the so-called boyfriend loophole, which expands current law to prohibit dating partners or recent dating partners convicted of domestic violence from purchasing a firearm.
Rights for those individuals will be restored after five years if they haven't been convicted of other violent crimes again.
Senator Marco Rubio balked at the urgency.
He tweeted, quote, We're being asked to vote tonight to begin debate on a gun proposal whose legislative text was made available less than an hour ago.
The legislation also sets up a grant program for states to expand mental health services for schools and for schools to increase safety measures.
It would appropriate a billion bucks for schools to expand mental health support, $300 million for school security and violence prevention programs.
So again, that $300 million for school security and violence prevention, I'm fine with that.
The red flag stuff seems like a bit of a red flag to me.
The package also includes a crackdown on illegal sales of guns, would require an investigative period to review juvie and mental health records for 18 to 21-year-old gun purchasers.
Now, I'm not sure if that law actually is sufficient because you actually have to now Open up juvie records?
Does the bill actually do that?
Or does it just provide an extra period in states that allow for that?
The expanded background check for young buyers could involve a call to the local PD, take up to 10 days if there are areas of concern that authorities need to follow up on.
The bill would also make it a federal crime to engage in straw purchases, the buying of a gun for someone else, or gun trafficking, which is the illegal trading of guns.
Not sure how you would establish a straw purchase in the case, for example, where I buy a gun and then I give a gun to my 17-year-old son for his birthday.
I live in a rural area.
We want to go hunting together, so I give him a gun for his birthday.
Is that now a straw purchase that is now going to make me a federal criminal?
Well, John Cornyn is the top GOP negotiator and widely considered the heir apparent to Mitch McConnell.
He says unless a person is convicted of a crime or is adjudicated mentally ill, their ability to purchase a firearm will not be impacted by this legislation.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says that they are going to ram this thing through.
The gun legislation is expected to cost several billion dollars.
Lawmakers aren't insisting on waiting for a formal cost estimate to vote for it.
Gun control advocates are backing the legislation.
And they see this as the first step, obviously.
The NRA opposes the legislation.
They say it can be abused to restrict lawful gun purchases.
But one thing That people on the right are saying, and I think is well-founded, is this is, as always, just the first, this is just a foot in the door.
The minute you start passing gun legislation on the basis of terrible things happening, well, next time a terrible thing happens, they'll push more gun legislation and you will just pass that gun legislation as well.
Apparently, Republicans wanted to include language banning the use of any federal spending in the bill for abortion.
One person familiar with the talk said that had been resolved, no funding would be used for abortion.
And again, final hurdles in the text, according to the Wall Street Journal, had centered on red flag laws known formally as extreme protection orders.
Lawmakers had needed to work through differences on expanding federal law preventing people convicted of domestic violence from obtaining a firearm.
Current law bans those who are married, who lived with, or have a child with the victim.
So the boyfriend loophole is you don't have any of those things, but you have a girlfriend and you're beating her up.
Which, again, don't really have a problem with that.
Not sure why it's a federal issue as opposed to a state issue, but...
All right, now, is any of this really going to solve the broader problem of mass shootings in schools?
Probably not, because as it turns out, the problem of mass shootings in schools very often tends to be derelict action by people who ought to know better, which is why, for example, we are now finding out that the Uvalde classroom door that supposedly the police refused to breach because it was locked wasn't locked at all.
Here's the director of Texas Department of Public Safety, Stephen McGraw, explaining.
There's compelling evidence that the law enforcement response to the attack at Robb Elementary was an abject failure and antithetical to everything we've learned over the last two decades since the Columbine massacre.
The on-seat commander waited for a radio and rifles.
Then he waited for shields.
Then he waited for SWAT.
Lastly, he waited for a key that was never needed.
It's unbelievable.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Macross said that police officers armed with rifles and protected by body armor were on the scene within three minutes.
Three.
Even had the door been secured, which it was not, they had the tools to break it open.
They waited an hour and 14 minutes to go into the classroom despite hearing ongoing gunshots, knowing kids had been shot inside, knowing at least one teacher shot was still alive.
Horrific.
Horrific.
No gun control issue is going to fix that.
The failure of law enforcement at that level, at that scale, Man, heads should roll.
I mean, there may be criminal negligence involved here.
Just insane.
According to McCraw, Arradondo arrived in the school 11-36.
That's three minutes after the shooter began massacring the kids in the classroom.
His timeline indicates that Arradondo repeatedly instructed other officers not to go into the classroom as he sought classroom keys and police protective equipment.
McCraw said a teacher had previously reported the strike plate on the door jamb was broken and that the door was unable to lock correctly.
He said he doesn't believe officers at the scene even tried the handle.
Arradondo did not bring his police radio to the scene.
It wouldn't matter because the police radios apparently don't work inside the building.
He said testing after the shooting showed only that border patrol radios were functional, which shows that the local law enforcement didn't even have the ability to talk to people who are inside or outside.
Just ridiculous.
Ridiculous.
Seven minutes after all of this, school district police officer Ruben Ruiz came into the school telling other officers that his wife, teacher Eva Morales, had called him and told him she was shot, Apparently they then took his gun away to prevent him from going in.
Just horrific failure of action by this police department.
And no amount of additional funding to red flag laws is going to fix that.
And this looks more like a political stunt by both Republicans and Democrats.
Democrats say they got something done, Republicans to say that they helped out.
And then it does like an effective solution to any of this sort of stuff.
Apparently Senator Cornyn also pledged on Tuesday that he was going to negotiate some sort of deal on immigration.
According to Igor Bobich, who is a reporter for Huffington Post, according to Bobich, he said, the vibe in the Senate is so positive right now, Schumer gave Susan Collins a fist bump.
A smiling Cornyn tells Alex Padilla, the senator from California, first guns, now immigration.
And Sinema said, that's right, we're going to do it.
I mean, that is, I don't know what you guys do for a living.
You don't have any agreements with Democrats on immigration.
What exactly are you doing?
So count on Republicans to try to pull Joe Biden's chestnuts out of the fire.
So we'll get to the Joe Biden economy, the Joe session in just one second.
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Who should we remove from office?
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Dr. Fauci!
What are you talking about?
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If they say to half of the country, you can't, that half of the country needs to say, screw you, we will!
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Meanwhile, if the Republicans are trying to save Joe Biden through gun control legislation and or amnesty legislation, the economy is not going to save Joe Biden.
And that remains the biggest issue.
Joe Biden keeps going out there and saying that everything is going to be fine on the economy.
He even keeps saying that we have the lowest inflation rate of any industrialized country, which is not true, not by a long shot.
Canada's inflation rate right now, for example, is 7.7 percent.
It sucks.
That's way lower than the United States' inflation rate.
So the Biden administration has decided that their solution is just to pretend that nothing bad is happening.
They're now Kevin Bacon and Animal House.
And things are exploding behind them like everything is fine.
All is well.
It's all.
So here is Karine Jean-Pierre, a rather untalented White House press secretary, trying to explain that we are not in recession.
We see that the economic strength that we have seen from this past year, from the action that the President has taken with the American Rescue Plan, with what we have seen with the historical gains, that is going to help us deal with the recession.
Right now, we don't see a recession.
We're not in a recession right now.
Right now, we're in a transition where we are going to go into a place of stable and steady growth.
Oh, that's what it is.
It's not a recession, guys.
It's a transition.
Yes, everything is fine.
Everything is totally, totally fine.
And meanwhile, Joe Biden, his idea is to mock oil companies.
So this idiot has undermined the ability to refine or produce oil in the United States, and he's mocking the oil companies while you're paying six bucks a gallon.
What a genius.
He's so good at this.
It's mildly sensitive.
I didn't know they'd get their feelings hurt that quickly.
Look, we need more refining capacity.
and at times vilified it, and that the administration would need to take a change in approach in order to make progress on reducing energy prices and to increase supply.
Do you have a reaction to that, sir?
He's mildly sensitive.
I didn't know they get their feelings hurt that quickly.
Look, we need more refining capacity.
This idea that they don't have oil to drill and to bring up is simply not true.
This piece of the Republicans talking about Biden's shutdown feels wrong.
9,000 of them, okay?
I just can't get over it.
The man can no longer use his face hole at all.
Eventually he's just going to look like Keanu Reeves at the beginning of the original Matrix.
They're going to go to him and his mouth is just going to not exist anymore.
He's going to be like, because that's basically what it sounds like now.
Okay, so Joe Biden.
Him ripping on the quote-unquote sensitive oil companies?
He's the one who's sensitive.
He gets mad anytime anybody points out that he's really crappy at his job.
Corinne Jean-Pierre, back to her.
She's out there saying that this is all Putin's price hike.
No, it's not.
And no one believes you because it's dumb.
He has said he has been very clear.
He wants to make sure that he is dealing with what the Americans are facing at the pump, which is high prices due to inflation.
Part of it is the pandemic.
Part of it is Putin's war on Ukraine and Putin's tax hike.
So he wants to do everything that he can to make sure that we are answering those calls.
Well, you're not doing everything you can to answer the call.
What are they talking about now?
They're talking about a gas tax holiday.
But wait, I was informed that the gas tax is absolutely necessary in order to lower carbon emissions.
I mean, these people have been calling for global carbon taxes for years on end.
And now the minute that the prices go up, they're like, oh, I guess we can't afford that.
Yeah, maybe because your policy is garbaggio.
Maybe that is the rationale.
They always have some excuse for why their bad policy is not to blame for anything.
Joe Biden is, by the way, still asking for more spending.
We're in the middle of an inflationary spiral.
He wants more spending because he says there's going to be another pandemic.
A second pandemic.
It's all so tiresome.
It really is.
You made this pandemic last longer than the pandemic actually lasted.
And you blew out the inflation because of it.
And now you're asking for more?
And then you're blaming Putin?
Sorry, this ain't on Vlad.
We do need more money.
But we don't just need more money for vaccines for children, eventually.
We need more money to plan for the second pandemic.
There's going to be another pandemic.
We have to think ahead.
And that's not something the last outfit did very well.
That's something we've been doing fairly well.
That's why we need the money.
You've been thinking ahead?
By what stretch of the imagination?
If they had thought five minutes down the road, they would have realized inflation was going to blow out.
Not just that, if they've been thinking ahead, remember, this is the crew that was like sending out masks in January of this year, thinking ahead.
Joe Biden can't even think behind.
Joe Biden is thinking he's still in the 1970s.
Everything is fine.
Everything's going great.
It's incredible.
And by the way, he has another solution that is definitely going to help so many Americans.
Joe Biden now wants to plan, he plans to cut nicotine in cigarettes.
Basically destroying the cigarette industry and it won't destroy the cigarette industry.
It'll just turn everybody into a criminal who is now distributing Lucy's on the sidewalk.
Unfortunately, in the United States, a disproportionate number of minorities smoke.
The smoking rates differ fairly widely based on racial and ethnic background.
So Joe Biden just targeted people who are the socioeconomic Lower class.
I mean, you're talking about people who earn the least because there is a large income striation among people who smoke in the United States.
So the people who are the poorest in the United States are now going to be targeted by the Biden administration.
The Washington Post now reporting the Biden administration said Tuesday it plans to develop a rule requiring tobacco companies to reduce nicotine levels in cigarettes sold in the United States to minimally or non addictive levels.
An effort that if successful could have an unprecedented effect in slashing smoking related deaths and threaten a politically powerful industry.
The initiative was included in the administration's Unified Agenda, a compilation of planned federal regulatory actions released twice a year.
The Spring Agenda was released on Tuesday.
Now again, I don't smoke.
I don't like smoking.
I think smoking is yucky.
I also recognize that what you are actually going to do by doing this is create an entire industry of illegal distribution of nicotine-riddled cigarettes.
That's what's going to happen here.
And then you're going to be shocked when there are additional confrontations with the cops or with the feds.
They don't think through their policy beyond like the next five minutes.
But don't worry, the experts are in charge.
Janet Yellen informs us that the Fed is going to do fine.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, straight from the Proudfoot family of the Shire, said she thought that the Federal Reserve's efforts to combat inflation could be effective, according to the Wall Street Journal, without significantly increasing the unemployment rate.
The tight labor market that formed over the past two years as the economy recovered rapidly from a brief pandemic recession could aid the Fed in combating inflation, Yellen said while speaking at a press conference during a visit to the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
Rising wages across the economy could draw people back into the labor force, which remains smaller than it was before the pandemic.
That larger pool of labor could ease upward pressure on worker wages, a factor that feeds into broader inflation.
The pandemic-inflated economy I think needs to be taken into account.
To my mind, makes it more possible for us to achieve lower inflation, she said.
Well, I mean, you've done a crappy job so far, so I'll trust you now.
She says, staying in the neighborhood of tight labor markets, what people would dub full employment, I think is possible.
I do believe there's a path.
I'm not absolutely certain of it.
Well, that is reassuring.
Really, really excited about that.
So, this administration is, again, whistling past the graveyard.
On the one hand, there is no recession, everything is fine.
On the other hand, we need the oil companies to take action right now.
We need a gas tax holiday.
We need all sorts of new inflation spending on the pandemic.
We need all these things.
If all of this seems mutually contradictory, that's because it is.
There's no through lines this administration, other than they do what they want to do and damn the consequences, it does not matter.
That is the message of this administration.
Now, it doesn't mean the Republicans can't save him.
You can always count on Republicans to be too stupid for the room and start making overtures to a president who's in the midst of dramatic failure.
You can see the political failures that the Republicans seem to be pursuing right now.
Republicans can make that mistake in the future.
You know, the Republicans tend to get fat and happy on the one end, where they're like, oh, well, you know what?
What if we make a concession here?
That'll make us more popular.
And it's a bad concession that undermines support of the base.
Or they can make an error on the other end by nominating bad candidates in the belief that the Democrats are so bad there's no way that the Republican can lose.
Either way is stupid.
If Republicans hew to anything remotely like reality, they should win a stunning victory in 2022.
If they don't, then they will minimize that victory, and they will minimize the prospect of victory going into 2024.
Alrighty, we'll have more content coming up for you later today.
Coming up soon is the Matt Walsh Show.
It airs 1.30 p.m.
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